I first met Jose Cuervo when I was 17, it was my roommate’s 18th birthday and we had a house party going on. Before the night ended, I downed 17 shots, and the rest of the pre-med batch were reduced to blubbering half wits. One was crying her heart out, another was playing the guitar and singing tunes off-key, the rest were either knocked out or puking at the washroom. Peps was still sober, she wanted to go out and buy 2 more liters of our chosen poison, and so we did.

“Why do you drink a lot?”, I think I asked her that in between gulps of fresh air as we searched the town for an open liquor shop.
“I just want to know how it feels to be really really drunk”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know, it’s a license to do something stupid. Maybe I’ll do something stupid then. It’s so overrated to be always in control, you know. Why aren’t you drunk yet?”
“I don’t know, maybe I’m not allowed to do something stupid.”

We do this weird ritual whenever we have a party with JC. We would take small pieces of paper then write anything there – why we wanted to get drunk, who we hated, who we loved, who we wanted to ask forgiveness from, and other things like that. Then we would roll those tiny sheets and drop them inside the empty bottle. We’d write the date and it will be like some time capsule that we would keep for posterity.

August 14. Dear M. This is my initiation to the inebriated society. I might like it here. I might stay a while. Maybe I’ll even earn that license to do something stupid someday, but for now, I just can’t understand, for the life of me, why you left me like that. Please teach me how to let you go, I just can’t do it when I’m sane and sober.

Since then, JC became my best friend. I would find myself lost in a bottle even before sundown. When I’ve had one too many shots, everything becomes more clear. I can’t understand why people say they forget everything, on the contrary, I remember every detail. I can hear even the most minute sound, and sometimes I feel that if I really try, I could get out of my body, look at myself from the outside. and say: “Hey! Why are you doing this to yourself? You can’t let one person affect you that much. There’s a whole unexplored universe out there, get over it already.” Then everything would be calm and quiet, my heart would stop hurting, my stomach would stop that queasy feeling it gets when you learn that someone whom you thought loved you, has betrayed you and walked all over you. Yes, everything stops when the shots start overflowing, the moment is freeze framed and I don’t feel so lost anymore, I could forget that the rest of the world is moving on while I’m stuck in a moment.

Yesterday, Zet and I were talking about sobriety and how I can’t remember when I last drowned myself in tequila and vodka ice. I checked my calendar last night and it was 38 weeks ago, the scars I got from that experience hasn’t completely healed. No, I guess time isn’t that fast a healer, and yes, I did earn my stupidity license, but that’s another story.